A noodle chef, a gravity-defying train, and the ghost of the Dreamcast collide in the most joyful arcade game I’ve played in years. On Switch 2, it barely drops a frame.
The silliest pitch of the year, played completely straight
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with a train reads like a joke someone forgot to delete. A multi-ton commuter vehicle ollieing off a rail, kickflipping over a gorge, grinding a power line while an announcer eggs it on in Japanese. I went in expecting a one-note gag stretched over a campaign. What I found instead is a score-attack game with real teeth, built by people who clearly grew up on Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi and understood why those games worked. Undercoders, the Barcelona studio behind it, has made the best kind of throwback: one that borrows a mood rather than a checklist.
What the game is about
Denshattack! takes place in a future Japan where the Miraidō corporation has sealed the big cities under enormous domes, its grinning mascot Molty beaming from every screen to remind everyone how lucky they are to live inside. Out in the unsealed countryside, life runs on gang rule and stubbornness. You play Emi Araki, a young noodle chef who gets pulled into the world of Denshattack on a delivery run by Fernando, an aspiring journalist. Denshattackers are train drivers who treat the rail network as a canvas, pulling tricks at absurd speeds partly for the art of it and partly to spit in Miraidō’s eye. Emi sets out across nine prefectures, from rural Kyushu up through Osaka and Tokyo and on toward the snowfields of Hokkaido, taking down each region’s gang leader on her way to the top.
Gameplay
The structure is classic arcade: get your train from one end of a course to the other, and make it look incredible. The left stick and shoulder buttons handle boosting, drifting, and hopping between parallel tracks (multi-track drifting is a real verb here, and yes, it is as funny as it sounds), while the right stick flicks out flips and spins in mid-air. Grinds, wall rides, and moments where the train leaves the rails entirely get layered on as you progress, and chaining it all into one unbroken combo is the whole point. Build a long enough streak and rainbow tracks materialize in the sky, opening detours that send your score into orbit.
Every stage grades you with a medal, and the scoring weighs your tricks, your time, and optional “dares” scattered through the course, with a bonus for finishing without a single crash. Around that spine, Undercoders keeps swerving. One level is a straight race against a rival gang where only a podium finish counts. Another is a skate-park-style score gauntlet. One has you dropping passengers at stations like a runaway Crazy Taxi tribute, one sends you dodging fireballs inside a volcano, and one has you collecting costume pieces so your train can cameo in a kabuki play. I’m still not over that last one. The bosses escalate just as shamelessly: a mecha magical girl one hour, a walking castle or a mechanical worm the next.
The honest caveat is the learning curve. Denshattack! hands you a lot of systems quickly, and each new prefecture adds another. For my first few hours I kept fumbling inputs at speed, panic-jumping into obstacles and limping home with bronze medals. A couple of mechanics, the sideways two-track slide especially, feel like one idea more than the game needed. Generous checkpoints and near-instant restarts keep the frustration low, though, and the moment it clicks, somewhere around the third prefecture, the game turns into a machine for producing grins.
Story
The plot runs on shonen anime logic: every rival pushes Emi to learn a new trick, every victory wins another ally for the cause. Emi herself carries it. Her relentless sunniness against a grey, domed-in world is disarming, and the theme underneath (a corporation slowly suffocating creative expression, and a subculture refusing to let it) lands harder than a game about kickflipping trains has any right to. Between missions you can visit onsen scenes where the cast soaks and chats, filling in details like where Emi’s train came from or how Madoka and Yamagata go back. The catch is volume. The dialogue is wordy, the cutscenes pile up, and the pacing of an otherwise slick campaign sags under them. Everything is skippable, and by the midpoint I was skipping liberally. A leaner cut of this story would have served the arcade heart of the game better.
Graphics and performance on Switch 2
Denshattack! skipped the original Switch entirely, and on Switch 2 you can see why the developers held out. The cel-shaded look, all thick black outlines, blazing blue skies, and canary-yellow carriages, is a deliberate love letter to the Dreamcast era, decorated with kanji that bursts across the screen mid-trick and a hype announcer scratching records over your combos. It runs at a 60 frames-per-second target docked and handheld, and it holds. In my entire playthrough the frame rate only flinched once, during a late-game boss fight, and a handful of collision oddities were the only other rough edges I hit. Restarts after a crash are close to instantaneous, which matters enormously in a game where crashing is part of the tuition.
Soundtrack and sound design
The soundtrack is the flex. Tee Lopes of Sonic Mania fame leads the score, with Sean Bialo and Andrew One alongside him and guest tracks from Ryo Nagamatsu, Richard Jacques, Takenobu Mitsuyoshi, Shoji Meguro, and Harumi Fujita, the whole thing curated through Kid Katana Records. That is eighty tracks and nearly four hours of breakbeat, Y2K hip-hop, punk, and funk, and it gives every prefecture its own pulse. It might be the best original game soundtrack of 2026 so far. The game is fully voiced in both Japanese and English, and you can swap dubs from the settings mid-playthrough without touching your save. I flipped between them for fun and settled on the Japanese cast, though Emi and Fernando’s English performances are excellent.
Player experience
The campaign runs ten to fifteen hours depending on how hard the gold medals hook you, and they will. Collectibles feed a garage where you buy and customize trains with liveries, patterns, and stickers, and fund Fernando’s fanzines, which unpack the lore of each region. At $19.99 (it also arrives day one on Game Pass, and PS5 and PC versions launched alongside this one), the value is absurd for how much handcrafted spectacle is in here. Just know what you’re signing up for: this is a game about repetition and mastery, and players allergic to eating a few dozen crashes while learning will bounce off before it blooms.
Verdict
Denshattack! is the rare high-concept joke with a masterpiece of an arcade game underneath. The trick system sings once it clicks, the level design never stops showing off, and the soundtrack alone is worth the ticket. Wordy cutscenes and a stiff early learning curve keep it just short of classic status, but this is the most fun I’ve had with a score-attack game in a decade, and Emi deserves a sequel already.
